Strange Scaffold founder Xalavier Nelson Jr. says his dog airport game that uses stock canine JPEGs couldn’t get made today because of AI.
Will Nelson <\/a>
Published:<\/span> Jan 6, 2024<\/time>
Strange Scaffold founder Xalavier Nelson Jr. says the studio and publisher’s first game, An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs<\/strong>, “couldn’t be made today” thanks to how generative AI has taken over the internet and complicated the process of using stock images in media projects.
Released in 2021, An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs<\/a> is a delightfully absurd indie game<\/a> with an equally delightfully absurd premise; you’re trying to find your fiancé at an airport across the galaxy, where every single attendant and many of the characters are stock JPEGs of dogs. It’s certainly an interesting pitch and one that I still smile about after playing it when it came out.
It was the first big game Nelson directed at Strange Scaffold, which later went on to make games like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator and Sunshine Shuffle, and the concept was actually the by-product of a development accident that we’ll get to later. “Today I couldn’t make it, because of generative AI,” Nelson says in a TikTok.
The creative process came from how “public domain images exist and we can use those out of their context to build something beautiful and new in a fairly safe way.” Nelson adds it was “pretty clear” where the images came from during development, which took place between 2019 and 2021, if you knew where to look.
The reason An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs couldn’t be made today is because of how generative AI has been trained on both public domain and non-public domain images, with these new images then put back into public domain sources. “If you use a public domain image – and increasingly sound, video – there is no guarantee that is in fact public domain, freely recontextualizable, stuff.”